Quotes About Adaptation

People change and things go wrong but just remember life goes on.

Everybody in life is a chameleon.

Change your opinions, keep to your principles; change your leaves, keep intact your roots.

Life happens. There is no point in being upset or down about things we can't control or change.

There is no route out of the maze. The maze shifts as you move through it, because it is alive.

Life is a tide; float on it. Go down with it and go up with it, but be detached. Then it is not difficult.

I specialized in transitional environments, and this particular location transitioned several times, meaning that it was home to a complexity of ecosystems.

Anonymity amongst the wreckage of the earth. This is what I sought. And a good pair of boots for when it got cold.

Hummers evolved high in the Andes Mountains with progressive colonization of lower altitudes and expanded latitudes, especially to the north, and eventually to the far reaches of Canada and Alaska. They remain restricted to the Americas, with the vast majority of the 300+ species residents of South America.

That month the southern white rhino and a species of pangolin had gone extinct. Wildfires in five countries meant animals were crawling to the side of roads to beg people speeding by in cars for water. People were poisoning vultures and shooting bats out of the sky, scared of pandemics. To care more meant putting a bullet in your brain. So, like many, I had learned to care less. Silvina called it "the fatal adaptation.

He would study any number of topics and had no real preferences, his many eyes enthusiastically moving back and forth as he read the pages at a steady clip. I don't believe he needed light, or eyes, to read, but I know he liked to mimic what he saw me doing. Perhaps he even thought it was polite to seem to need light, to seem to need eyes.

Because our minds process information solely through analogy and categorization, we are often defeated when presented with something that fits no category.

Desolation tries to colonize you.

I had the unsettling thought that the natural world around me had become a kind of camouflage.

Writing, for me, is like trying to restart an engine that has rested for years, silent and rusting, in an empty lot—choked with water and dirt, infiltrated by ants and spiders and cockroaches. Vines and weeds shoved into it and sprouting out of it. A kind of coughing splutter, an eruption of leaves and dust, a voice that sounds a little like mine but is not the same as it was before;

A ghost bird might be a hawk in one place, a crow in another, depending on the context. The sparrow that shot up into the blue sky one morning might transform mid-flight into an osprey the next. This was the way of things here. There were no reasons so mighty that they could override the desire to be in accord with the tides and the passage of seasons and the rhythms underlying everything around me.

The intimacy that salamanders have with their environment forces them to be sentinels of environmental change.

Nature practices deceptions in every angle. Evolution will create a being for any niche that can be found, no matter how unlikely. When

And I never did look back for better or worse. If funding for a project ran out or the area we studied was suddenly bought for development, I never returned. There are certain kinds of deaths that one should not be expected to relive. Certain kinds of connections so deep that when they are broken you feel the snap of the link inside of you.

Would that not be the final humbling of the human condition? That the trees and birds, the fox and the rabbit, the wolf and the deer Ã¢â'¬Â¦ reach a point at which they do not even notice us, as we are transformed.

My voice had a rasp to it, then. I wasn't yet comfortable talking human. My voice had a rasp, and I gazed upon the bison head on the wall and my voice became raspier still. I gazed upon the mossy rock imported from another country, the water feature in the house, and wanted only to return to all fours and drink from the pond. To gaze at the reflection and remember who I was, not who I had become

They had their lives, and I had mine. I liked most of all pretending to be a biologist, and pretending often leads to becoming a reasonable facsimile of what you mimic, even if only from a distance

And life changes. Maybe just a little, maybe a lot. And at some point, it just isn't worth the fight to fix it.

Criminalistics doesn't exist in a vacuum. The more you know about your environment, the better you can apply- (This quote was never completed in the book because Rhyme stopped abruptly at the end of it. I really wish he had finished his thought.)